Monthly Archives: July 2010

Reach Women Through Social Networking

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comScore released a very interesting report about women on the web entitled appropriately Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet. They look at many different factors related to women in general and found interestingly enough that:

“…social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally 75.8 percent of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7 percent of men..”

This may be an obvious finding to most however it is always good to have data to back up assumptions. Additional factors to note about women vs. men:

  • women spend 8 percent more time online
  • women spend 20 percent more time on Retail sites overall than men
  • women Spend 30 percent more time on social networking sites than men

Here is the full comScore Press Release with more information.

$7.7 Billion of Venture Capital In Three Months

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Venture Capital Investments
According to a Dow Jones VentureSource Press Release VC investment is on the rise. They state that investment is near pre-recession levels. Which I guess means it’s almost as good as it was before the economy began to have issues. Which I assume is a good thing. Here is what they compared, they say that the second quarter of 2010 (April, May, June) had $7.7 billion invested by venture investors which is the largest amount in a quarter since Q3 of 2008. Comparing Q2 this year to last year they state that the deal count is up 13% and capital raised is up 26%.

$7.7 Billion of Venture Capital In Three Months
Having raised VC myself and been involved with startups for years, it still blows my mind to see how many billions are are invested. The article has much more detail and is a good general read.

Online Advertising Prices Down

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Online Ad Prices
I read this article in Advertising Age about Social Networks Sink Online-Ad Pricing, it’s a good read. Advertising Age quoted some statistics from May 2009 to May 2010 from Comscore, here is the quote from Advertising Age:
“A recent analysis by ComScore shows social networks, primarily Facebook and MySpace, have over the last year drawn an average CPM of only 56 cents, compared to the $2.43 average for the internet at large.”

What Does This Mean?
You can draw your own conclusions about what this does or does not mean. Essentially markets are supply and demand and the better a market can gauge the value of a product or service, the faster a stable price will be achieved. Of course there are many factors, including supply and demand as well as effectiveness. Just because social sites drive inventory does not mean they drive hefty revenue. And it is amazing how easy it is to effect supply and demand. Imagine if Facebook has three ads per page and removes one, all the sudden inventory drops by 33% and individual ad CTRs and responses may increase (purely hypothetical). The same is true if they decide to increase advertising units on a page.


Why Should You Care?
The reason I wrote this is not to get into the intricacies of pricing and all the variables but to simply point out that you can purchase some cheap online advertising and test it for yourself, it may or may not work for you. Whenever you find a niche that is relatively cheap it is worth testing and then exploiting before it’s gone.

.CO Registration Begins July 20

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.CO Public Registration Begins July 20th
Learn all about the .CO Domain Registration. The general availability begins July 20th at 2pm EDT. If you pre-registered a .CO domain name with GoDaddy, here is the chain of events.

Process When General Availability Opens
When General Availability opens GoDaddy process your PreRegistration application. As they are calling it a potential domain rush they ask that you allow 24-48 hours for the confirmation status email letting you know if the domain was obtained.

Landrush Applications
All the registrars submitted .CO Landrush applications to the Registry. Those domains that only had one application will be available next week. Those that were submitted by more than one customer will result in an auction. The Registry will contact you with auction details and information for the domain(s) in question.

Android Mobile App Creator

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Create Your Own Android Application in Minutes
Creating mobile applications for the Android operating system has never been so easy. It is easier watched in this 1 minute video then explained in words. To learn more go to Google Labs App Inventor. Funniest thing about this page is the example application you could build, according to the Google page you could “build an app that periodically texts “missing you” to your loved ones.” – hahaha, I take it one of the Google employees working on this application creator tool was working a little too much considering the application they decided to develop/show as an example.

iPhone Killer
To me this is fascinating how easy and quickly you can build and deploy an application for the Android. The start of a iPhone market share stealer by Google? Time will tell.

Creating iPhone Only Applications May Be a Bad Idea

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Mobile Market Report May 2010
Courtesy of Comscore here is their May 2010 report of the mobile market share. You can find their entire report here. It is an interesting report and like any report you have to first know what was collected and how before you rely on the data. Here is what Comscore says about the data itself: “The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone operating system (OS) platforms in the U.S. according to their share of current mobile subscribers age 13 and older, and reviewed the most popular activities and content accessed via the subscriber’s primary mobile phone.“.

Platform Market Share
What I find most interesting are the overall statistics and market share. For the Months April/May/June of 2010 there were 49.1 million people in the U.S. who owned smartphones. They compared the platforms from Feb to May of 2010 and Google Android was the only one that gained market share. Everyone else lost market share to Android I suppose. The final numbers were RIM at 41.7%; Apple with 24.4%; Microsoft with 13.2%; Google with 13% and Palm with 4.8%.

Creating Applications for iPhone Only Are You?
For those creating applications for Smartphones it is interesting to see that Apple lost 1% during this time period and Google gained 4% during the time period. Note that the new iPhone came out in June and whatever impact it may of had is not included in this report.